| Oct. 5, 2007 The
Southland’s air quality agency today announced a nationwide competition that
will award up to $100,000 to university engineering students for developing
a zero-emission leaf vacuum for commercial gardeners.
“This is an exciting opportunity for our best and brightest engineering
students to use their ingenuity to help develop a new clean air technology,”
said William A. Burke, Ed.D., Chairman of the South Coast Air Quality
Management District. “We are hopeful that winning projects will spur
equipment manufacturers to produce an environmentally friendly replacement
for commercial leaf blowers.”
The contest challenges university engineering school students to design
and develop a backpack-style, rechargeable battery-powered, leaf vacuum that
will address environmental concerns linked with traditional leaf blowers –
noise, exhaust emissions and dust clouds – and meet the needs of commercial
gardeners.
AQMD will award a first place cash award of $40,000; a second place cash
award of $20,000 and three third place cash awards of $5,000 each for the
design and development of a prototype leaf vacuum that meets specific
performance requirements designed to address the three environmental
concerns. The five winners will also be reimbursed up to $5,000 each for
construction costs.
Engineering design proposals are due to AQMD by Dec. 5, 2007. The top
five finalists will then be invited to develop an operational prototype for
demonstration and judging. Winners will be announced in May 2008.
Winning prototypes will be used to encourage equipment manufacturers to
produce an environmentally friendly alternative to commercial backpack leaf
blowers, which are a significant source of smog-forming emissions and a
frequent source of complaints due to their loud noise and tendency to create
large clouds of dust.
Through its Leaf Blower Exchange Program, AQMD has exchanged 3,000 older,
highly polluting leaf blowers with new, gasoline-powered, low-noise models
by STIHL. While the STIHL backpack blower is the cleanest and quietest
available today, if used improperly there is the potential for dust clouds
to occur.
For more information on the leaf vacuum competition, visit AQMD's website
at www.aqmd.gov.
In other action today, the AQMD Board approved $1 million to help up to
100 dry cleaners transition to non-toxic, non-polluting cleaning
technologies.
AQMD will provide up to $20,000 for cleaners replacing perchloroethylene
(“perc”) dry cleaning machines with CO2 machines and up to $10,000 for those
replacing perc machines with professional wet cleaning systems. Since 2002,
AQMD has provided $4.25 million to help dry cleaners transition to
environmental friendly technologies.
AQMD is the air pollution control agency for Orange County and major
portions of Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
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